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Snapping, Clicking Hip: Types, Causes and Management

Episode 272

38 Minutes – Dec 28, 2022

0:00 / 38:33

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Questions this episode answers

Is a snapping hip something to worry about if it doesn't hurt?
Usually it's painless and many people treat it like a party trick. I still see it as a sign, like gray clouds, and some preventive work is worth doing.
What causes a snapping hip?
Inside the joint it's most often the labrum or loose bodies. Outside the joint it's usually the IT band or glute max rolling over the greater trochanter, the hamstring over the sit bone, or the iliopsoas tendon snapping over the front of the hip.
What does hip impingement feel like?
Front of hip pain that comes and goes, worse with sitting and deep squats. Bringing your knee to your chest or your knees together feels pinchy.
Should I stretch a snapping hip?
Stretching calms the irritable muscle for about a day, then it comes back. If you've been stretching and it isn't working, stop.
Do I need an MRI for a clicking hip?
Not usually. A good history and physical exam can tell whether it's inside or outside the joint, and imaging isn't a smoking gun.

What a snapping, clicking hip actually is

A lot of people call it dancer's hip. That name is fine. But it hides the fact that several different structures can make the hip snap, click or clunk.

Some of you can show me. You move the leg and I can see it. Others I have to feel with a hand on the hip. Most people never get it checked. It's a party trick.

The estimates I've seen: about 90% of dancers have some clicking hip, around 80% of them on both sides, and 5% to 10% of the general population. Most of the time it doesn't hurt.

I still see it as a sign. Gray clouds don't guarantee rain. It's nice to prepare anyway. I once told a man his painless clicking knee was nothing to worry about. Within days he had real pain.

Inside the joint or outside the joint

The first split is simple. Intra-articular means inside the joint. Extra-articular means outside it.

Inside the joint, it's most often the labrum: frays, small tears, bigger tears. Loose bodies in the joint can do it too. A good physical exam and a solid history usually tell us whether it's inside or outside. Imaging is nice to have. It's not a smoking gun.

Outside the joint splits again, external and internal. Draw a line from your front pocket down the front of your thigh to the knee.

  • External (outer side): most commonly the IT band sliding over the greater trochanter, the bony bump on the outside of the thigh bone. The glute max can roll over that bump too, a big clunk that feels like salami rolling across the back of the hip. Further back, the hamstring tendon can roll over the sit bone.
  • Internal (inner side): the classic dancer's hip. The iliopsoas tendon (the deep hip flexor) snaps over a bony ridge on the pelvis or over the front of the femoral head.

How hip impingement and labral problems build up

I think labral problems, especially the non-traumatic ones, give signs well ahead of time. Femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) is one I believe feeds into them.

Hip impingement symptoms tend to look like this: pain in the front of the hip that comes and goes over years, worse with sitting and deep squats, and a pinchy feeling bringing the knee to the chest or the knees together.

Here's my take on the cascade. Feel free to disagree. It starts with poor core function. That can tilt the pelvis forward, which leaves the hip less room to move before it runs into the pelvis. That's how you get front of hip pain, impingement and possibly labral tears down the road.

The body is one big unit. If your hip doesn't work well, your back or knee takes the load. So rehab starts at the core, sometimes with the mid-back and breathing.

Overactive muscles and force coupling

Muscles work in teams. Not even a bicep curl is isolated. Some muscles move the joint, others stabilize it, small ones assist.

The endurance-type (tonic) muscles tend to get overused: low back, TFL, IT band, hamstrings, hip flexors. Nobody complains their glutes or abs are too active.

Think of an electric car where one wheel always spins faster. That muscle has a low irritability threshold. It takes over and the team falls apart. Good rehab calms that muscle down, then gets everything working together in a real movement: a squat, a hinge, a side plank, a ballet movement. Skip the step-by-step and the hip flexor or TFL just takes over again.

What falls short and what helps

Here's what people usually try:

  • Rest: a few days is fine. In my experience about five days is enough. Longer and the area deconditions.
  • Stretching: it calms the irritable muscle for about a day. It doesn't fix the teamwork. That's why the routine never ends.
  • Ice and heat: they change sensation for a while, then the pain returns.
  • Over-the-counter medication: useful in a true inflammatory phase. Using it daily to get through practice is a bad strategy. If you're taking a lot, talk to your doctor.

And here are five ways to reduce it on your own. These are general. Everybody is different.

  1. Do less of what provokes it. Not bed rest. If high leg extensions trigger it, lower them for about a week. Don't pick the scab.
  2. Do glute exercises. Simple glute work often settles the pain fast. Core work can help too.
  3. Walk more. With an arm swing. About an hour a day is really nice. A lot of the hip pain I see follows long sitting.
  4. Stretch it less. If stretching isn't working, stop.
  5. Strength train. Especially dancers. You won't get bulky. It just has to fit the goal.

Most people respond within three to four weeks. Reducing pain is simple. The hard part starts after.

Key takeaways

  • Several structures cause a snapping hip, inside or outside the joint, and the fix depends on which one.
  • A painless click can still be a sign worth preparing for.
  • Overactive muscles disrupt the team, so rehab has to retrain the whole hip, core included.
  • Stretching, ice and pills calm things briefly but don't change the pattern.
  • Do less of the trigger, train your glutes, walk, stretch less and strength train.
  • If it hurts, get examined by someone who spends real time with you.

At a glance

Conditions and injuries
  • Snapping hip (dancer's hip)
  • Femoroacetabular impingement (FAI)
  • Hip labral tear
  • Tonic muscle dominance
Anatomy involved
  • Iliopsoas tendon
  • IT band and greater trochanter
  • Glute max
  • Proximal hamstring and ischial tuberosity
  • Hip labrum
Symptoms described
  • Audible or palpable snapping
  • Clunk at the side or back of the hip
  • Front of hip pain with sitting
  • Pinching with deep hip flexion
Treatments and exercises
  • Reducing provoking movements
  • Glute and core exercises
  • Daily walking with arm swing
  • Less stretching
  • Strength training
Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically (whisper.cpp large-v3-turbo) and may contain errors.

Before we start the show clinicians, I want to invite you to take advantage of the premium version of the podcast that we have specifically for you. It was created for you. This podcast you're going to hear today is lay public friendly and it's intended to be so all of the stuff that you wish we would have covered more of like, Hmm, I wonder what the underlying biomechanics are of that. What's the clinical reasoning process? What positive orthopedics tests are there? I wish they would do more case presentations on X, Y, and Z. We're covering all of that in the premium version. And we have been for the past two years. So take advantage of it. Scroll all the way down, click on it and listen to it. It releases every Monday for about 15 minutes. You're going to love it. See you guys in the show. Here we go.

You're listening to the restoring human movement podcast where movement experts discuss the latest evidence-based practices to help you and your clients move with mastery. And now your host, Dr. Sebastian Gonzales. Hey everyone, it's Sebastian, your host with the restoring human movement podcast. Thanks for joining the movement movement. This is your first time to show. Welcome. You missed a lot of great episodes about hips, about different parts of the body, about impingement, about knees, about backs, about SI joints. Some of them are solo podcasts, like the one that's going to be today. Some of them are guest podcasts. Sometimes we just have a discussion and so on.

By the way, if you have not subscribed already, please do. And we have videos of some of these podcasts, as well as some of these strategies that I'm talking about on our YouTube channel. Just go on to YouTube and put up, put in a performance, play sports care, and you'll find probably 500 videos. There's a lot of videos there of nice free content there. So we're going to cover a really in-depth topic, but we're not going to just skim the surface today. We're going to do, I'm going to do my, the best that I possibly can to unravel some nice nuggets of education for you guys with a very complex topic.

It's snapping, clicking hips. Some of you may call this dancer's hip. I think the layman's term is going to be dancer's hip. But as we start talking about things today, you're going to realize that, huh, it might be more complicated than just calling it like one type of problem for a snapping, clicking hip. There's different things that can create it. There's different mechanics. There's different things that bother people. There's different structures. And so there's a lot of uniqueness that's usually needed when you're going to help manage it. In this podcast, I'm going to cover the types of snapping, clicking hips that you may find, as well as some general mechanics that tend to sometimes be associated with it.

By the way, it's important to note that everybody is different. I know that it's very cliche to say that, that everybody's different, their problems different. No, really. You're different. Your day-to-day life is different. What you want to do with your hip moving forward is different than me. And how it started is different. The structure may be different. Everything is literally different. And so because of that, your treatment and your recovery program, the strategy that you will take to make it better is different. That's the facts. I'll also cover some typical self-management strategies and some of the things that tend to not really work well, in my opinion.

But Dr. Google will tell you probably to do. And I'm going to cover five ways that you can help reduce it. Some simple things to do. Again, everybody is different. So I'm just going to give you general things that tend to work for a lot of people. Now, when we're covering this at first go, we have to understand that there are, again, different things that will create this clicking, snapping, popping hip. Although dancer's hip is the cliche term for it, it's typically characterized by a feeling, so palpable, meaning you can feel it, or audible snapping sensation that's heard around the hip. A lot of people that I've met with it, they actually show me.

They're like, look, look, I can do it. And you can see it. On some people, it's clunk. Other people, you can't. You've got to put your hand on it. And it feels like it just kind of something moves. And most people don't go anywhere for this. They just, hey, I can do this. It's like a party trick. Especially dancers can typically do it. I think the estimation is that 90% of dancers can do this or have some type of clicking hip. And I think the estimation is that 80% of them have it both sides. And so maybe it is more associated with limberness of the sport. But who knows? Maybe yoga people at the same time can do it.

Or gymnasts as well. It'd be interesting to see if gymnasts don't have it as much because there tends to be more strength requirements with gymnasts as a general sport than dance. I'm not saying dancers are weak, but it's typically not emphasized in the training. The estimation is about 5% to 10% of people in the general population have snapping hip. But most of the time, it doesn't hurt. It's just painless. But most people will feel like they're dislocating their hip or it'll feel like they're rubbing on something. And some people that feel that it's happening are really worried about it. And I think there is merit to doing some treatment for it preventatively.

I had a gentleman one time that came in with, it wasn't with hip per se, but it was a clicking, snapping knee. Like he had no symptoms with his knee other than this was kind of a sign. His knee was kind of clicking and snapping. And I said, did you, like what's going on? And he said, well, this just happened. I just started running. I usually don't run. I've been doing five miles a week. And this just started happening. What do you think about that? And I said, well, does it hurt? And he said, no. And I said, well, I wouldn't worry too much about it. You know, within the next couple of days, he actually developed pretty intense knee pain.

And it ended up being a labral tear. And I don't think it was a labral tear when we first talked about it because later on he had an incident where he was squatting where he had a, it presented like a labral tear. It was like a quick jolt of pain and so on. So I'm not saying that you guys will necessarily develop a labral tear associated with this problem, nor a muscle tear or anything like that. But I think there's things that we can do to decrease the possibility. I like to see it as it's a sign. You see gray clouds in the air. It doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to have rain. But it'd be certainly nice to prepare.

There's nothing wrong about preparing for it. And the good news is if you're an athlete or if you're just someone who's just day-to-day wanting to move about your day and be physically able, the strategies that I'm talking about that I'm going to talk about today that you can do on your own, they're not bad. It's not bad. It's like flossing and brushing your teeth. It's good hygiene for your body. And so I do encourage you guys to, even though if you think, well, I'm not an athlete, I'm not a dancer, it's okay. So the strategies I'm going to talk about later are very helpful for all walks of life.

But again, it's not super specific because I don't know what's going on with you, but I can certainly help if you'd like. Now, when we're going to categorize snapping, clicking hips, we should use a few different categories to get you to understand that there are different structures involved. First is extra-articular, and the second is intra-articular. This is very technical jargon, extra-intra-articular, so on. Just know articular means joint. Instead of saying extra, I say outside, outside the joint. And intra means inside the joint. So inside or outside the joint. What this does is it narrows down what we may be looking at.

Intra, or inside the joint, snapping hip, means that it's typically going to be labrums. Most commonly, it's going to be labrums of various different types. Frays, larger tears, smaller tears, and so on. But it can also be things like loose bodies in the joint space. And so just know that a good physical exam, like seeing someone on your medical team who knows how to examine a hip and seen a lot of hips, can help you figure out what it may be. An image is not always required, but usually a good physical exam can see what's going on. I know with the physical exam we do, at Performance Place, you can totally tell.

Like if it's going to be intra or extra-articular. You can tell if it's in or outside the joint. We take a really good history. We listen to what you're saying. We link everything together to figure out what movements and activities create it. How do you feel? As well as linking those together with your presentation, how you move, and also doing a physical exam. So those things are important. Imaging is nice to have too, but it's not a smoking gun by any means either. So we have inside joint, which we talked about. Now we've got to talk a little bit about outside joint or extra-articular. In this one, you can break into two different categories as well.

We have external and internal. Don't think about internal on internal joint. Think about inside, like inside your hip, like inner part, outer part. So external is if you drew, take a line and drew it straight down from your pocket all the way down to your knee and the front of your thigh. Everything to the outer part is external. Everything on the inner part is internal. Obviously, there is a gray area right there. Like what if you have something on the line? Well, then I'd probably say it's going to be more internal if we're going to talk about, if we're going to split hairs. External snapping hip is most commonly attributed to the IT man moving over the greater trochanter, which is a bump.

It's a bony bump on the femoral head during certain movements like moving your hip forward and backwards and turning it in and out and so on. But also, if you go further away from that line and kind of wrap it around to the side of the hip now, and even to the backside, we have a possibility of the proximal hamstring tendon rolling over the ischial tuberosity. That's more in the backside, but we also have the possibility of the glute max rolling over the greater trochanter, which again is on the outer side of the hip. So this will usually present as a bigger clunk, I've noticed. People who have the glute max involved, it feels like there's a piece of salami like rolling over the side, backside of the hip.

I don't know too many people who have pain. It's just really odd to feel and see. People who have more of the IT band involvement, again, it's going to be more front hip pocket, kind of where the key, like there's that little small key pocket that's on your pants that may be out of style now, but it used to be in Levi's. That's right around that area, and it's a smaller muscle. It's going to be a little bit of a, less of a show, a party trick. And then the hamstring is way in the backside. Internal snapping hip is going to be more of your common, quote unquote, dancer's hip. It's the iliopsoas tendon, which is snapping over the underlying bony prominences, such as one's called the iliopectinial eminence, which is part of the pelvis, or it's going to snap over the front part of the femoral head.

There's other things you can create this as well, such as cysts and abnormalities in the tendon itself. But generally speaking, it's going to be the hip flexor group. Now let's get into a little bit of mechanics of how these things actually work. I tend to think that labrums, the intra, the most common intra or inside joint, actually there's probably signs of things that are yet to come. Some people have what we call hip impingement. So femoral acetabular impingement or FAI, which can, I believe it leads into a labral pathology. It leads into a labrum, but it's a non-traumatic one oftentimes or can be traumatic.

But similar to the shoulder, they found the impingement, longstanding impingement in the shoulder can be associated with non-traumatic rotator cuff tears, usually from the joint side, not the top side, it's the bottom side of the muscle. And it kind of insinuates that it rubs it away a little bit. And so I think into the labral region, the intra problems, inside joint problems, I think there's signs of it well ahead of time, especially in the non-traumatic ones. Typically hip impingement will show signs of pain in the same region. It may come and go over the years, increase with sitting, increase with things with deep squatting.

Typically there's a limitation of hip flexion or bringing the knee to the chest and especially putting it, like putting your knees together. It feels like it's pinchy on the inside. I know people who have developed this problem just by waking up, you know, in their bed and all of a sudden in front of their hip hurts. The way this thing kind of happens, the way that all these things kind of happen, most of these things kind of happen is that there's a progression of problems that come from just poor movement mechanics, past injuries, or some of these clicking things can actually come from past surgical interventions.

I won't cover those in particular today, but especially the ones that are not really traumatic, that didn't come from a surgical intervention. I believe there is a series of events that happens. You guys can follow me on this. You can agree to disagree if you'd like. However, I think that we first start by understanding the body is one big old unit. You cannot separate things. As much as we want to say that we can rebuild, hit a hip without doing a core or a back or a mid-back, it's not possible. But it's really common practice to believe that. And sometimes people, when they come into our facility, they're like, well, I just want to just work with my hip.

Well, we got to look at your back a little bit too. Well, there's nothing wrong with my back. I know, I know. But this is all one big ecosystem. Everything works together. All right. If your hip does not work well, then your back will take the load. If your hip does not work well, your knee will start to take the load. If your hip does not work well, then some of the musculature around it will become really tight. There's a lot of things that we can go into complexity-wise, but just trust me, everything needs to be rehabbed together. And when you get with someone who really knows what they're doing with rehabilitation programming, they will program things that will just look like they're hard.

It shouldn't be like 30 different exercises for different regions of the body. Generally, the exercises selected, maybe five to 10 of them, over the course of a couple months, generally are progressions of each other, and they're linking things together. Things work together. You can't separate them. It's like trying to eat a sandwich without salivating. They're together, right? It has to happen together. So I tend to think what happens is, first, people have poor core function. What this comes from itself, this is probably arguable, but I think the cascade events, it comes from poor core function.

I'm saying function, generally speaking, because function is, some people believe it's core strength. Some people believe it's core stiffness. Some people believe it's more of internal pressure or resiliency, being able to hold position once you keep position, not having more movement in your core than in your hip. And so, generally speaking, function is poor. What tends to happen there sometimes is that that will create more of an anterior tilt of the pelvis, which then decreases the amount of movement that the hip can do without running into the pelvis. This can create sensations of front of hip pain, but also it can create things like hip impingement and possibly label tears in the future.

Now, the thing that we're going to go backwards on a little bit here is that typically core poor function, not starting rehabilitation from the center, from the center of the core, is, I think it's poor form. I think it's incorporated into everything. Obviously, there's a time and place for everything, but I think if you're going to rehab the hip or rehab the knee, you've got to start with some core stuff. You have to. And you may have to scale that back a little bit to even incorporate some of the mid-back and even breathing components. But here's the deal, is that there's generally two types of muscle groups in the body.

There's the tonic and phasic. The tonic group has more endurance. It has more mitochondria in it. It lasts longer in movements, and also they become more irritable. They tend to become overused. They're all the overused muscle groups. You never see anyone who says, my glute muscle is way too active. You don't see the glute max is way too active. You've got to turn that thing down, right? And you never see the abdominal all is way too active. Like you see low back musculature, too active. You see the TFL is too active. The IT band, too active. Hamstring, too active. Illus psoas, hip flexors, too active.

These things are too active. And so generally what you have to do is you have to pair some rehabilitation with the phasic group. The phasic group is the other groups. It's all the muscles that no one ever complains about being too tight. They're the ones that all the trainers out there will, I think, I think it's a sloppy way of saying it, but it's not completely accurate, but I think it speaks well. You need to turn this muscle on. These muscles need to be turned on as a group. The phasic muscles need to be turned on as a group. But also, they have to be on at the same time as the tonic, and then a movement has to be accomplished.

An exercise or an activity needs to be accomplished. And this is what the exercise tends to be. The reason why these tonic groups are important in regards to rehabilitation, well, actually, the tonic and phasic group are important. Because a lot of times when people do rehabilitation or they're doing exercise or they're having symptoms, their tonic muscle group is becoming, we call it tonic muscle dominance. These muscles all become super active in the activity. Now, not everyone will have pain with this, but I know that you probably look around at someone, you look at their low back. Like, say they don't really have a t-shirt on or they have like a cutoff, and you see that their low back is always so tight.

Or you look at someone, you look at their neck, shoulder area, and their upper trap muscles and levator muscles right around, like, they look like bat wings. They're just out, right? And these people aren't really in pain, but these are examples of tonic muscle dominance. Like, the tonic group is working really hard and dominating a movement. So, what we can do is we can, with good rehabilitation, well-coached rehabilitation, you can make tonic and phasic work together to accomplish a movement. And that's really what good rehabilitation is. Some people will have pain associated with the problem, and then they dip their foot in the injury pool, and it never really comes out.

Some people just take some rest and it goes away. That's the good, that's the lucky ones. But generally speaking, I think that directly trying to decrease the amount of activity of the tonic muscle groups can help out. Now, you might wonder, why do these tonic muscle groups work so much other than just the energy system? That's a good question. We're going to cover that with a concept called low irritability threshold. Would you like to work with us here at Performance Place? Perhaps pick our brain about your situation. You can. For a limited time, we're offering a $29 special. That's 30 minutes to discuss with us any questions or concerns you may have about your current situation.

We call this the Discovery Session. You get to learn if you want to work with us, and we get to learn if we should work with you with your specific case. Contact us at info at p2sportscare.com to learn more. Actually, what I should probably do before we get into low irritability threshold, let me actually read you a section of a book that I wrote. It's going to be, there's a link in the description. It's called Understanding Hip Diagnosis, and I'll let Dr. Google lead you to failure. We're going to go over the section of force coupling, and then we'll go over low irritability threshold. I think pairing the two really well works well to understand what's going on and why tonic muscle dominance is kind of a problem with this scenario.

Force coupling, to really understand it, first we've got to take a closer look around the hip to understand the concept of force coupling and how things actually work together. As we look closer and closer, remember that all of these concepts go together, and they can be corrected by something like a specific movement-based program. Typically, it needs to be coached. But the truth is that you don't really need to understand these concepts to get better. You just need to do the work. Muscles don't work in isolation. They work in teams called force coupling or co-contraction. It's literally impossible to contract any single muscle at any time without any other muscle turning on.

Muscles work in teams. Even a bicep curl. If you think about a bicep curl, a bicep curl is not a bicep exercise in isolation. Where you feel the work may be the bicep muscle, but there's other muscles working at the same time. In this scenario, the exercise or movement is biased towards making the bicep work, but by no means is it in isolation. One muscle produces movement, which is called a primary mover. In this case, the bicep. The other ones stabilize it so the joint can actually move. These are called the antagonists. And there's smaller muscle groups that do some work to assist. They're called synergistic muscle groups.

Generally speaking, though, with the hip movement, the big muscles that you're familiar with, like the hip flexors, they are movers. They move the hip into flexion, open chain flexion, or bringing the knee to the chest. In this case, the glute max is the antagonist, and it helps it contract to support the hip so it doesn't fly at a socket and you don't hit yourself in the face with your knee. The synergistic muscles are the small ones, the ones that oftentimes can't hurt, like the piriformis, the glute medius, the core muscles, the pectineus, and so on. Generally speaking, pain-free hip flexion cannot work unless all these things work together.

So the body is one big unit. The pelvis also has co-contraction parts too. The core has co-contraction parts as well. And to understand a little bit more, rather than just focusing only on the muscles, we have to understand what creates these muscles to contract. So what makes these muscles contract? Well, the body has a nervous system. It has an electrical impulse system. It has an electric system. Okay? The body's central nervous system coordinates something like coordinates the force coupling or co-contraction, what do you want to call it, via electrical impulses, just like electricity to an electric car.

And to understand this a little bit more, I'll give you an analogy. With a normally functioning nervous system, a central nervous system, electrical current is sent to the rear wheels of the car. Think of this as your prime movers, your hip flexors, your big ones, your antagonists, your synergistic muscles. It's all the muscles that help out. Ideally, it sends the same electrical current at the same rate to both wheels so you can drive. However, in the body, the currents are not always necessarily the same. But I think to keep the analogy simple, let's just say they're exactly the same. Now, imagine you're driving and one wheel just always spins faster than the other and you just can't get it to stop.

Like that one wheel keeps going. Essentially, the electrical impulse going to the wheels is the same one. And why does this one keep spinning all the time? We can call this wheel overactive, where we say it has a low irritability threshold. It does not take much for it to become irritable or hyperactive. And so this high irritability of the muscle disrupts the force coupling, disrupts normal joint movement, and it makes it so the other muscles aren't able to help quite as much. So it screws everything up. But in this scenario, although it's easy to blame that muscle, saying it's hyperactive or irritable or so on, remember, the nervous system is what coordinates this thing too.

All right? The electricity matters. And so with rehabilitation, doing good rehabilitation, what you do is you kill the muscle that has so much irritability down, like get it down, get it normal, and then drive the car. You make it so that everything else works together. The only way to keep your progress is to actually get everything to work together in something like one of your ballet movements or to squat with it or to deadlift or to hip hinge or side plank. Whatever we want to do is the rehabilitation. But you have to be able to take a step-by-step approach to that or else that muscle is just going to take over.

That hip flexure is going to take over. The IT band is going to take over. The TFL, the hamstring, all those things are going to take over and you're going to end up with the same crummy problem. That's my personal experience with it. Now let's go into some self-management strategies that everybody tends to try and give you the pro of it but also give you the con. So typical stuff that people do is resting. Resting for a couple days, nothing wrong with it. It's all good. All right? You can do it. However, the longer you rest, the more the rest of your body becomes deconditioned, including the other musculature around the area, including the nervous system that supplies the area, and you generally get bored.

I mean, how many things can you watch on Netflix? Generally, about five days is enough to have rest, in my experience. Other problems require longer rest. I'm sure your surgeon, if you had a surgery, is going to tell you differently because it's a different scenario. But if someone just walked into our office under their own power and they needed a little bit of rest, this is probably about five days is enough. Stretching. Nothing wrong with stretching. However, you should be stretching the muscle that's highly irritable. This helps to chill some of the hyper-irritability out of it. However, it does not help out to improve the electrical impulse.

It does not help out to get the other musculature to help either. It simply stretches the area, decreases the irritability of it for a little bit of time, and then it just returns. A lot of times it'll return within about a day or so, which is why the phenomena of having a stretch and it goes away, and then you have to stretch again the next day. And having daily stretching routines that doesn't really go anywhere. It just seems like a routine. This is why that happens. Icing heating is really common too. This just changes the amount of sensation that you get from the region. Ice and heat are...

The sensation of heat and cold moves faster to the brain than pain does. Pain fibers are generally pretty slow. They're called C fibers. And so they... The sensation ones kind of dull down and kill off. The other ones, momentarily, until you stop putting that sensation of ice or heat into the region, and then it would just return again. Over-the-counter medication, it just depends. If you really have an inflammatory component, these may be helpful to you. If you're using them on a daily basis to try to get through your practice or through your activity or through your day, I think it's a bad strategy.

That's kind of like... It's like abuse. It's abuse of a very valid management tool, but it's used for a single phase in your recovery. It's used to address an inflammatory phase to starve the area of fuel for the fire that's going on there. And if you're using them all the time, like you got other things going on, like you can't just be using that. Plus, they've been known to create things like GI or abdominal distress. And I think it's been related to some strokes, if I remember the research correctly. So very, very rare. Don't freak out if you're taking it. But you need to talk to your doctor if you're taking excessive over-the-counter medication.

Now, here are five ways that you can help deal with it on your own if you're just wanting to find some easy tips. But remember, this is not specific to you. We have all these different types of clicking, popping, hips. And so the most efficient way to actually get better and get back to your activity is let someone look at you. Let someone see you move and then suggest something based upon what they see. Simple. They have to spend probably more than 30 minutes with you because they have to hear what you're saying, hear what's going on with it. They have to catch up on your story. And so if you're working with someone who doesn't give you the time of day, it's going to be hard for them to pick a little bit more specific for you.

So here's five ways. Number one is do less of what makes it happen. I know it sounds really silly, and you said don't rest. I didn't say bed rest. I said don't do the thing that provokes it. It's as simple as picking a scab off of a wound. Just let it heal up for about a week or so, and then just try it again. If it hurts to bring your leg to the side of your body, like extensions and ballet, then maybe just decrease the height for a little bit. Ask your instructor or tell your teacher that you're having problems with this, and you're just going to not do those movements for about a week. But it didn't mean you're being lazy.

You're just trying to not pick the scab off the air and then go back to it again. No big deal. No harm, no foul. You're not going to lose anything in a week. But it's harder to keep your fitness up and your strength up if you're in pain all the time. Number two, do glute exercises. You'd be surprised how simple glute exercises can help it. So the glutes become more stiff, and essentially for a short period of time, you're making them highly irritable. And then you're kind of matching the irritability of the other one. And so it makes it so the hip musculature becomes happy, the co-contraction and force coupling normalizes for a period of time.

And a lot of times it'll decrease pain associated with the area. Well, it may take a little bit longer to deal with the actual clicking aspect of it. But if there is pain, then that usually resolves it pretty quickly if it's appropriate. But sometimes doing more core work can help out too. Third is I would walk more. It seems very simple, but to get glute activity, walking with a little bit of an arm swing is actually one of the most helpful things you can possibly do. I'd venture to say that a lot of people who walk on a daily basis and sit less do really well with stalling off, having any of these aches and pains and clicking and popping and label tears and so on, unless they're unfortunate and they fell on their walk.

But generally, they do pretty well. About an hour a day is really nice. And I'm sure that some of you who felt the onset with this, it came on after a long car ride. It came on after you had to spend more time at the computer for whatever reason. Or you became inactive and then you became active. So there's a lot of people that I've met who sitting and being generally unphysically active tend to have more of the problems that present themselves, especially when they try to increase their activity. So walking is a very manageable way, a very simple way, a low risk way to load the body again, load the hip again to make it so that you're more in shape for your activities.

Fourth thing is stretch it less. If you've been stretching it a lot, stop stretching it, especially if it's not working. I remember one time we had a YouTube video on sciatica. This is not sciatica, but we just made a simple point. We said, if you're stretching it a lot and it's not working, stop. And I had somebody email us and they said, I can't believe how easy that was. All of my leg pain went away when I stopped stretching. I've been stretching for a year. And so you'd be surprised. Stretching, although it seems like it may be the right answer, if it's not working, you should change it. I think I said at the beginning of the podcast that generally people will tend to respond really well within a three to four week period of time.

Not to say that's the end of it, because that's right when the hard part starts. Reducing pain is very simple. It is super simple. And I know that some of you who have been in pain for a long time, you're thinking, well, you're wrong. No, most of the time you're missing something really simple and you can have someone help you find it. It may be that you're just creating your own problem over and over again. Unknowingly, I need to be clear. Unknowingly, we meet a lot of people with hip pain who just sit all the time. Stop sitting as much. Go for a walk. Their pain dissipates significantly within under a month.

I've met people with under a week. Recently, actually on our YouTube channel, I saw someone left a comment again. They tried a, it was a shoulder pain video and they did the exercise in the video and they said, you got to be kidding. I've had this pain for 15 years and in a five minute video, it took it all away. Crazy, right? I mean, I don't make these things up. There are simple things that you probably have not tried yet that will probably work. And if stretching is not working, stop stretching. Nothing wrong with it, but it's probably not helping. The fifth thing and the final thing is strength training.

This is for those people who don't strength train. If you're strength training already, this might not be something you want to add because you already are. It may be one of the things that are actually provoking it possibly. One of your exercises and the way you're doing a single exercise may be one of the things that is actually driving this problem to continue. But if you're not strength training, like a lot of the ballerinas that I've met, you should be doing a little bit. You know, like I think there's a time and place. I know that historically, dancers will not do any weight training. And I've heard even some dance instructors say don't ever touch weight.

And I think that's a little ridiculous and archaic, quite honestly. There's all sports, all Olympic sports, to my knowledge, even archery and curling and the ones that you don't think necessarily would, they all do some form of strength training. All right. They have it at the Olympic training centers. I'm sure ice skaters do weight training too. But the thing is, and I think the thing that scares people off, especially with the dance, is that they think they're going to get big and bulky. I would disagree because the amount of weight training I'm talking about is really not that much. It has to be appropriate for the goal.

And if your goal is to be a ballerina, you don't need to weight lift like a bodybuilder. They're different scenarios. Just like if you were going to train for a nutcracker, it's not the same thing as doing river dance. They're different trainings. And so the same thing goes along with strength training. But you need to realize that there's no quicker way to end your dance career than having ongoing pain in your hip. And so if something simple like weight training can help you, I think you should consider doing it. By the way, if you are a dancer and you're looking for strength training, I think Allie Christensen, she's on Instagram.

You look up Align Fitness by Allie. She actually does a really good job of making weight training appropriate for dancers. And I think it's very, very simple cueing and coaching and keeps all of your alignment concerns and your posture concerns and so on into consideration. So I found great things from there. So you can look her up on Instagram. But if you're not doing something and if you're scared of doing it, you should probably have a coach to help you. So there it is in a nutshell. There's a few different types of clicking, popping, clunking. Are they symptomatic? Are they painful? Maybe, maybe not.

If they are symptomatic, then you should be seen by someone who knows what they're doing, someone from a medical team to diagnose you, as well as figure out the mechanics of what's going on with you. Again, you don't need an image. If they're not hurting you, then possibly you could get away with it. However, if there is gray sky, it may rain. Consider making it part of your program to just optimize how your hip is functioning. Because if you are an athlete or a dancer, you're going to need your hip. If you are someone who's not a dancer and you're just like a 70-year-old person who's just trying to get them amongst their house, you need your hip to sit down to the toilet.

You need your hip to bend over. You need your hip to walk. You need your hip to get upstairs. You need your hip. Everyone needs their hip, but you also need your knee. You need your core. You need the rest of your body. You need your entire body. And that brings us back to a central focus of rehabilitation. It comes down to treating their body as a whole. It can't just be clamshells. There are other more productive exercises than clamshells out there. I can promise you that. So if you guys are looking for help, you can always reach out to us at info at p2sportscare.com, or you can look in the link description below.

We have a contact form in there as well. You can call us at 714-502-4243. It's important to note that we do offer virtuals. I know that's bypassed a lot of times by people. They say, oh, I'm not by you. I can't see you. You can. We have managed clicking, popping, clunking hips virtually. Ideally, it's nice to come in person. You get a lot of more testing and examination done. But if you can only do virtually, there is zero problem with that. So just reach out to us, and we can have a conversation and see what's best for you. We'll see you next time. Take care. Thank you.